S/V Deep Playa - Pearson 424

Sorry I’ve not posted anything in a while. We’ve been busy tending to other matters.

More on the boat later in the week.

I wrote about cleaning the tanks before, here’s a great shot that sums up installing the Seabuilt inspection port. Using the rubber gasket you pick your spot, find the center and mark all the bolt holes. Then you cut a hole in the tank and drill out all the bolt holes. Clean up the edges of any loose material and you’re done!

The piece on the right hand side folds in-half and slides into the tank. The second gasket and the solid top piece go on top and is held in place with 1/2” nuts and lock washers.

When we bought our Pearson 424, we knew right off the bat we had to replace the portlights and the teak eyebrow trim along the outsides of the cabin top. The existing portlights were old and leaked causing the interior teak veneer to delaminate, no structural issues. The plastic windows were also hazed over and they just looked poor. At the 2009 Seattle Boat Show we made the first decision towards the beginning of this big project in that we purchased our new portholes from New Found Metals, located in Port Townsend, WA. Its always nice to be able to support local businesses.

The new portlights are either slightly larger (in case of the 5”x12”) or much larger than the existing portlights so there is some work to enlarge the holes once the existing portlights are removed. Doing all of this prep work is actually really easy using the templates provided by New Found Metals. You clamp the template in place, trace your lines and cut out the new hole. You also use the template to drill all the holes for thru bolting the portlight to the outer trim.

One time consuming piece is handling the bolts. You have to custom cut the bolts that attach the portlight to it’s outer trim. Every hull is a different thickness so they can’t really stock every possible length. I used my handy vise, cut them with the Fein Multimaster, cleaned them up with the dremel and a sanding wheel and then used two bolts to ensure the threads were clean. Here’s a video of that process.

As we’re replacing the portlights, we’re also putting up new wood along the interior teak along the insides of the cabin top. We will match the new headliner to this when we replace that as well. Painting it all white will brighten the boat considerably and visually make the cabin feel a bit taller. We’re using 1/4” plywood, primed on the finished side at the workshop prior to installation. We epoxy the new wood to over the top of the existing wood. That is a pretty involved process of making a paper template, cutting out the new pieces, dry fitting them (which involves a lot of tweaking) then making the cut outs for the portlights and then finally epoxying the new wood in place.

Here are a bunch of photos which roughly chronicle the process. Click thru for larger pics or to see more. They look awesome, the glass is so clean and clear I keep thinking they’re open!

The fresh water system was less that sterile when we bought the boat and we've done a lot of work to raise our water quality. I’ve already talked about replacing all of the plumbing hoses throughout the boat, new faucets, shower, installing a system wide water filter, etc. The last step in all of this is to really clean the tanks.

Pearson 424s have three tanks. 60 Gallons port and starboard under the salon settees and a 50 gallon bow tank. Our bow tank was decommissioned by the P.O. and used as anchor locker. The salon tanks are fiberglass and are structural to the hull, have three internal sections with baffles between each. They are fed by deck fill plates connected to the tanks on the upper foreword end of thanks. There are overflow hoses as well, that I need to go through and ensure they run into the bilge, according to the other P424 owners they were vented into the lockers (lame).

Our port tank has a single 6” aft Beckson deck plate. This is a screw-out plate that is not water or air tight under pressure. The starboard tank has three such plates one in each section of the tank. Eventually, I want to replace all of these with stronger inspection ports and add real gauges so we don’t have to disassemble the settees to look in the inspection port to see if they are full. For now, we’re adding two Seabuilt stainless steel inspection ports to the port tank. I’ll replace the others when there’s not so many other things going on.

The parts have been ordered and I’ll work on getting them installed this coming week\weekend so we can clean the port thank.

Before

I knew the previous owner had reduced the size of the ice box, many cruisers do that. He did this by adding several layers of 2” foam insulation and then starboard on top of that. There was also a huge void in the bottom of the refrigerator that had a big jug of mystery labeled “A” and with a skull and crossbones on it. Well the refrigerator had that old refrigerator smell so Dawn took out all the now moldy foam insulation and cleaned the ice box.

After

We will definitely put back the starboard to mount the refrigerator element, but while we’re here in Puget Sound with cheap access to ice we’ll also use the larger ice box.

Next year, we’ll do the big refrigerator project to permanently shrink the size of the box, insulate to modern standards and reclaim the unused space for storage. This was just a clean up project and Dawn did an awesome job at that!